Critical Essay by John B. Rosenman

In the following essay, Rosenman finds parallels between Faulkner's story “That Evening Sun” and Bradbury's novella That Dandelion Wine, particularly the emphasis of heaven and hell in their work.

Faulkner's “That Evening Sun” (1931) and Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (1957) share an archetypal pattern that Maud Bodkin described in 1934. In her pioneer study, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, Psychological Studies of Imagination, she refers to a “pattern” of the “Heaven and Hell Archetype” in which Satan struggles “upwards from his tremendous cavern below the realm of Chaos, to waylay the flower-like Eve in her walled...